Becoming a market leader: Build and nurture relationships with your audience at scale

Twenty years ago, there were only a handful of ways to get eyeballs and ears to focus on your business: rent commercials on television, buy ads in print, or reach ears through spots on radio. It meant that the businesses with the highest advertising budgets could reach the most people, making it an uneven playing field for the rest of us.

But the world changed. The internet came along, and suddenly businesses were able to speak to people at scale. The entire landscape of how we marketed and communicated changed. We moved into an era of relationship marketing, where we stopped talking “at” our audience, and started talking “with” them instead.

The question in this era of relationship marketing now is: how do you become the most visible brand in your industry, making you the obvious choice for consumers? The answer: build relationships with your audience in a way that is scalable. Here’s the process that can enable you to do that.

Build An Attraction Model

The Recency And Frequency Principle says that when a consumer makes a buying decision, the brand that is front of mind is the one that has communicated with them the most recently, and the most frequently.

The challenge that arises for us as high-growth business owners is the task of achieving recency and frequency in a way that is relevant, attractive and resonates with our audiences. The solution is to focus on continually providing them with value through meaningful content that speaks to their hearts and minds.

It is imperative that you uncover how to speak with your audience in a deep and authentic way. Let me share with you a model that will allow you to do that.

Everything we do as human beings is motivated by two forces:

1. The need and desire to avoid pain, or anticipated pain– i.e something that may cause physical or emotional pain now, or in the future.
2. The need and desire to obtain pleasure, or anticipated pleasure– i.e something that will bring you pleasure now, or in the future.

There is no decision, however macro or micro, that is not motivated by these two forces. The same is true of your customer.These forces are the key to speaking meaningfully to your customers, as they encompass your audience’s deepest frustrations, fears, wants and dreams.

Horizontal: pain | pleasure

Vertical: rational | emotional (not immediate / anticipated)

If you can be the business that is not only speaking to their wants, but also speaking meaningfully to their frustrations, fears and dreams, the size of your audience and the relationship you have with them will grow exponentially.

Convert To Your Own Audience

There’s a huge difference between having someone know, like and trust you, and having them become a paying customer.

Unfortunately it is not as simple as attracting people to your business and subsequently increasing your sales. At this point your audience still has reservations, and it is your job to lower buyer’s resistance and gradually increase buyer’s acceptance. The best way to do this is to move them to a medium that you own – in most instances, that is email.

When someone opts in to receive your emails, they are giving you one very important thing: permission to continue achieving recency and frequency.

Keep in mind that no one wakes up in the morning wanting to sign up to another newsletter and increase the amount of emails hitting their inbox. However, they do want to belong, receive value and become part of a community. Your opt-in mechanism, whether it be a pop-up on your website or CTA on your social media posts, should be speaking to those wants.

Nurture The Relationship To Increase Buyers’ Intent

Perhaps the most frustrating thing I see business owners do in their marketing is try to get married on the first date. You cannot rush building a relationship, it must first be nurtured.

Throughout your audience’s journey with you, they’ll go through peaks and troughs in emotion. When they make a decision to opt-in to your emails and join your database, they are at the peak – they’ve decided to be part of your community. This is the ideal time for you to continue speaking to them in a way that adds even more value (and does not sell your product… yet).

Time and time again, our Members at The Entourage have come to us with an untouched and forgotten goldmine that we work with them to weaponise and accelerate their growth – an email list of people who haven’t bought from them, or people who have bought from them previously, who they’re not proactively or systematically speaking with and nurturing. But as soon as they start to be proactive in their communication with their audience, the revenue and profit growth is immediate.

The frequency of your communication should be front-loaded to suit their intent and level of emotion. Once they have opted in, contact them immediately, then again one day later, then again two days after that, then again five days after that and then one week after again. Beyond that, your communication can become less frequent to match their subsiding levels of emotion.

If I leave you with anything, it’s this: don’t forget about your database. The number one asset you have as a small to medium sized business is the relationship you have with the audience you own. Across tens of thousands of small business owners I’ve worked with over the past 15 years, it is the most-missed opportunity to increase the profitability of your business. Ensure the email and communication sequence is automated, and watch as your relationship with your community continues to evolve so that they end up buying from you because they genuinely want to.